The World as a Mathematical Game; John von Neumann and Twentieth Century Science.pdf by Giorgio Israel & Ana Millan Gasca

Author:Giorgio Israel & Ana Millan Gasca [Israel, Giorgio & Gasca, Ana Millan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

4.8 Von Neumann’s final years: a very engaged expert and the time stealthily borrowed for the scientist’s projects

Von Neumann’s feverish activity in the post-war years did not stop short at collaboration with the Los Alamos Laboratory and RAND and his position as an expert on government committees. Many private companies in the USA endeavoured to get him to work for them, such as Ramo-Wooldridge, IBM and the Standard Oil Development Company. IBM offered him a contract for the first time in May 1945, and he was authorized to accept it both by the IAS director and by the government agencies. However, in the end, he decided to pass it up and concentrate on the project of constructing a calculator at Princeton. In 1947 he signed a contract with Standard Oil for consultancy on oil prospecting, production and refining: he was paid 6,000 dollars for a maximum of thirty days work per year. In the course of this collaboration, he carried out important studies in fluid dynamics applied to oil prospecting. In particular, his main ideas concerning the analysis of the stability of numerical solutions of partial derivative equations, which he failed to publish, are contained in one of his reports to Standard Oil in July 1948.121 Later, in 1951, he began collaborating with IBM, on a contract that demanded the same time commitment as the preceding one but guaranteed him 12,000 dollars a year plus expenses. IBM was interested in obtaining his advice on a wide range of problems, from improvement of the efficiency of its plants using linear programming methods, to development of information technology systems having reliable low cost memory storage, and even planning of new products.

Even with his many commitments as public and private consultant, he found the time to develop new scientific projects, often linked to the new interests that arose during the wartime period. After ending his collaboration with the Moore School — and with the final controversy that this entailed, as previously described — he threw himself into another project, which has already been mentioned, the construction of the ECP calculator at IAS. On this occasion, he looked after the whole project: theoretical and engineering aspects, planning, the organization of the group of scientists and engineers, fund raising, and other administrative aspects. Convinced as he was of the enormous potential of the use of computers in scientific research and of the changes this would bring about, his main objective was to build a machine suitable for scientific activity. The ECP was used for design and application of numerical analysis methods developed by von Neumann and his group which were tested in applied problems such as those related to the numerical solution of partial differential equations in turbulence theory and meteorology.

This interest in applied mechanics, numerical analysis, optimization theory, mathematical statistics and other topics, several of which involved radically innovative mathematical techniques, was not of course peculiar to von Neumann alone. The various research programs developed during the war produced a spectacular boom of applied mathematics in the United States.

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